Field
Aspects of the present invention generally relate to an image forming apparatus that receives print data from a print service and prints the print data, a control method, and a storage medium.
Description of the Related Art
Businesses for connecting servers to the Internet and enabling the servers to provide cloud services have developed over recent years. Examples include a storage service for storing data in a file format and a database service for providing database functions. A printing system provided in the form of a print service or data conversion service on the Internet has also been desired.
The provision of services as cloud services is advantageous in that the servers can be located in a large-scale data center, which eliminates the need for customer-by-customer hardware management. Another advantage is that computing resources can easily be added according to the server load. As cloud services have become more widespread, demand has arisen for a pull-print environment in which print data is transmitted from a print server provided by a cloud service over the Internet and printed by a printer. Such a cloud service is mainly characterized by performing data processing of document data on the cloud side using a large amount of computing resources in a distributed manner to simultaneously process requests from various clients. A function of converting data into data formats interpretable by a wide variety of printers is thus important to the print server. This is because the data conversion that has conventionally been performed by data conversion drivers of client terminals can be performed by the cloud print server to implement cloud printing without a need for a client terminal. Japanese Patent No. 4509965 discusses such technique, whereby a printer integrates and prints pieces of print data into which a piece of print data is divided for the sake of conversion processing by a plurality of servers different for each document type.
If the number of pages or the number of copies to be printed of submitted document data is large, the print data increases in size and it takes a long for the image processing server discussed in Japanese Patent No. 4509965, which is a print server, to perform the data conversion processing. In such a case, the start of printing is delayed and the user is kept waiting because the printer is not able to start printing until all the print data included in the print job is converted.
For quick first print, a print server may be configured to sequentially transmit print data on completed pages to the printer for printing without waiting for the completion of all the print data. However, in such a configuration, a pull-print application arranged in the printer to obtain print data from the print server is expected to transmit the print data received from the print server to a controller for controlling a print engine via a communication port. Since the printer prints print data transmitted by one communication session as a single job, even the print data in the same print job is processed as that of different print jobs once the communication between the pull-print application and the controller is disconnected. If the conversion by the image processing server takes time, the connection between the pull-print application and the controller can be disconnected.